Red was her favourite colour. The colour of adrenaline rushing through her veins, the colour of hungry lips of youth, the colour of passionate zeal, the colour of fire and sunset…the colour of flamboyant flowers, red was her ember that kept her determinations ablaze of roaring fires. Red shall always be her only favourite colour. She seldom wore it though during her years in University as she wanted to save it for the best moments of her life, her wedding!

Sometimes a stranger wanders into one’s life with or without a purpose. The little madness of love is not so minor when the one person who can relieve the madness is the only one who cannot be reached or found. Hence one seeks out allies in this stranger who can, if not fill the deep edges of sorrow of lost love but at least numb that sorrow half as deep. Her sudden wedding was an outcome of a decision she made during rebound, and her wedding vows have created a livid trail of the atmosphere. She ended up marrying an Indo Canadian, the stranger! An Indo Canadian whose only demand was not to wear the colour red on the auspicious occasion of the wedding. She gave in, thinking it was a small price to pay. She wore an ivory-toned outfit instead!

Her wedding night was morbid, and the honeymoon suite was dreamlike luminous to a point where she started to feel scared, anticipating a fuller perspective of life after she wakes up. What was life going to be like? What has that night got in store? Was it the beginning of a gamble or has she lost it all already?

There was no reason to negotiate the void between an empty wedding night and the unjustified scattered fragrance of Mogra (Arabian Jasmine). As lovely as it was, the Mogra canopy over the stately bed was too dramatic for her, so she decided to sit away on a recliner by a country style writing desk. One by one, she removed a total of thirty-four bobby-pins that were dutifully holding up her bouquet like hairdo of thick wavy jet black hair, wrapped up to the finest in an army of same-sized crimson roses. Even though the night had more questions than answers to offer, it was the worse use of her time waiting for some life to happen. The clock tick-tocked slower than ever while she removed her glittering gold ornaments, unconsciously included the chunky wedding band as well. Mustard yellow coloured Indian gold was never an object of her desire, and jewellery made her too conscious; mostly, she just wore sharp ends of wooden toothpicks in her ears to keep the ear-piercing from plugging. However, she enjoyed displaying earthy costume earrings on select occasions to compliment her otherwise subdued outfits. It was not like her to have layers of cake icing-like make up on her smooth peachy brown face; she had nothing to hide, so she painstakingly rubbed her face off clean of the coats of deceiving craftsmanship of colours from the bridal salon that morning. The clock was still running slow, and she was better off in the classroom, not here, she thought. She did not belong to sensual white satin sheets; the scent of Mogra started making her obnoxious. She wanted to escape this night. She wanted to run away and never look back. The night was savouring a whirlpool of long halt.

Her heart jumped out when suddenly she inhaled a propulsive force of creepiness, and foul smell of liquor filled up lobes of her lungs. Just like a demon unannounced, the Indo Canadian groom thrust opened the doors to the suite. Her breathing process stopped midway, and she felt a cold wave suddenly rush through her stream of blood. Mozart, in the backdrop, seemingly stopped to conduct too. It was a silence that only a wolf could have broken. Indo Canadian groom clutched the bony prominence of her shoulders and slurred, “welcome to my world my mail order bride”. He then pushed a somewhat oversized solitaire ring in her right-hand wedding finger, which looked awfully out of place on her skinny hand. Much before she could even relate herself to the new title, or say something, the drunk Indo Canadian groom managed to sustain a fool’s paradise until wee hours of the morning for himself. He created an elaborate deception of Godly love under the lustful layers of his skin, which she wisely understood as his sexual misconduct only. There was no pleasure in that pain, rather a fragile line between pain and insult that night. He tried carefully by concealing unflattering flaws in his evident character to her naked eye by playing strategic stresses on his charming virtues. For the first time, she came across the ugly face of life that smelled nothing else but unwanted spirits and acted on demonic impulses. She felt suffocated between the white satin and loathing force, pressure and weight of a new person in her life whose only way to express any emotions were through a quick release of an overflowing, erect penis, over and over again. Her continuous belief in several years of romantic poetic studies during classroom hours and after-hours started to get foggy. The theories of semi-toxic, insanely passionate, tumultuous, intense self-discovery via a process of breakthrough unison of love on highs and lows of maddening ruptures of committed and non-committed expressions were nowhere to be found within the confines of the honeymoon suite that night. The romantic Victorian poets failed that very night for a twenty-two year old bride who still smelled of fresh henna and traditional milk, turmeric and floral bath.

Mozart’s heavenly musical notes in the background started to choke her at this point. She wanted to bury all strings associated with the great music master and conductor alongside the same pauper’s grave where Mozart rested in the piece. She felt like life was slipping away; the harmony and fantasies of Mozart’s notes were melting glass in the ears of a corpse she felt herself to be. Indo Canadian groom’s rigorous and unwelcome advances in the name of honeymoon night had exhausted her. The fragrance of Mogra had finally died down amidst the stench of sweat, semen and alcohol, and most of all, disappointment and shock. A mere scope for a sense of any romantic arousal had died a very young death at the hands of her capacity to revolt. She was mad at her Victorian English poet laureates; they let her down. Holy Matrimony was anything but Holy!

Deep in her unconscious reserves was a pervasive need for a logical universe that could justify the romantic theories and poetry she studied during her Grad and Post Grad years. However, suddenly, her real universe was one step beyond the logic she believed in; the reality of the moment was invasive and nerve-wracking to the mail order bride. Within the three hours of the second half of her honeymoon night, she knew that Indo Canadian groom had no interest in her. He was not interested in any sense behind her stories of collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, books, miniature Buddha, autographs, stones, pebbles, clay figurines, little angels, cacti, pens, mugs, old toys, carnival, and fair tickets. Indo Canadian groom had not paid any attention to her luscious and thick curly black hair. There were no words reaching out to her in admiration, no sign of a possible love in the big scheme of life for her she knew already. No two souls were whispering or exploring the depths of bodies together in that semi- luminous suite, as she had pictured while reading Sir John Milton’s poems all these years. The sickle moon behind the sheer curtains of the suite silently witnessed the invasion of the sanctity of her personal space, body, and not to mention her identity. The Pythagorean and platonic poetry stanzas that she swore by started to creep into her being like an evil fabrication of a mad scientist who believed in taking over at any cost, any formula. Indo Canadian groom finally fell asleep after exhibiting heavy volumes of “consumer culture” of the west and the honeymoon night crept along.

Tossing and turning on mercilessly crushed up sheets of the stately bed and finally with her back towards the strange Indo Canadian. She recalled clearly, “Don’t read these big fat books, they are going to make your brain go crazy one day… you are growing up fast, learn the ways of the world instead or else you will be naïve and bookish all your life, hence cheated”. In her family home, the uneducated maid had suggested every time she would see her engrossed in her chapter books. However, she never paid any heed to the maid’s point of view. At sunrise, under running water, she consoled the freshly acquired black and blue marks on the petite frame of her body. Maybe she was trying to wash away the Indo Canadian groom’s sins from the previous night. She hoped to soon enough run back to a nearby library and search through all the encyclopedias for all sorts of dictionary definitions of the term “mail order bride.” She had survived a night as one; she just wanted to put the finger on the trigger and numb her pain. She wanted to come to terms with the fact that her life with a stranger has commenced falling apart!

William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds…” buzzed afresh in her ears as the running water whirls down the drain of the milky white shower…the most promising couplet over and over again…
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out ev’n to the edge of doom.

“Love is not real if it alters; love lasts until the edge of doom”

With this thought and many more in her mind she smiled sneakingly at grand philosopher/ love song writer…

The ideology of a moving sea between the shores of two souls seemed ludicrous. To be wounded by one’s perception of love and bleed willingly for the rest of life was never included in the chapter books that she grew up reading. She was naive. The uneducated maid was right!

– Anoop Kaur Babra